The increasing use of personal computers at work and in the home has created a stressful environment for the user. Most available computer user input/output devices such as visual displays, hand-operated input devices, e.g. keyboard and mouse devices, and audio output devices interact with the upper part of the body, leaving the legs and feet inactive. This inactivity in the user's lower body can increase the stress to the computer user. A means to reduce stress and maintain alertness of computer users is desired. A desirable means would interact with the user; it would adapt its actions in response to the user's actions.
Numerous prior art personal vibrators are available, including vibrating chairs, foot massagers, and hand-held vibrating massagers. Conventional mechanical vibrators, having a steady motion pattern, are used to soothe but, do not provide a changing stimulus to the user to maintain alertness.
Other vibrators include pre-set vibrating patterns. Such fixed patterns are necessarily limited by the vibrator's controller and become monotonous over time.
A vibrator could be controlled by a programmable motor controller driven by a computer to provide interactive stimulus to the user. Such controllers, however, are expensive and require software specific to each type of computer with which they are used.
It can be seen that all prior art vibrators suffer from a number of disadvantages:
(a) They provide only constant or fixed patterns of vibration, thereby failing to maintain the user's mental alertness. PA1 (b) They do not adapt to the user's actions to provide interactive stimulus. PA1 (c) If one were to use a conventional controller with a vibrator to provide an interactive stimulus, software specific to the user's computer type would be required. As this software would need to be adapted to the specific processor, operating system, application software, and user interface equipment used, a great expense would be incurred in development and customer support.
The increase in multimedia computers has created sophistication in computer games, such as 3D space and adventure, flight simulation and driving simulators that offer fast acting graphics and sound effects.
The various input devices such as the mouse, joystick, steering wheel and pedals allow input to interact with software. Feedback to the user is mostly through graphics on screen and audio on the speakers. Although they offer virtual reality, they lack critical physical feedback.
The existing numerous personal vibrators, such as foot vibrators and vibrating chairs do not provide interactivity. Attempts to interface such vibrators to a computer's software and hardware requires modification to both the hardware and software. Therefore, the previous attempt limits the adaptability to the existing or yet unknown simulator and game software.